When it comes to the future of the world’s coasts, few places on Earth matter more than the ice-choked, storm-tossed Bellingshausen Sea.
There, the warm ocean currents whirling around Antarctica first wash up onto the continental shelf and bathe the vast ice sheet, making the region the tip of the spear for the melting processes that are raising sea levels globally.
So when Andy Thompson, an environmental scientist at the California Institute of Technology, got a chance to go to the Bellingshausen next year, he seized it. There’s so much to be discovered there that any expedition is the oceanographic equivalent of going to the moon, Thompson said.
Now, President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting could take away the ship.
Among the many deep cuts to scientific research in Trump’s proposed budget is the abrupt termination of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the sole U.S. icebreaker dedicated to Antarctic research. The budget also pauses development of a new vessel that was supposed to succeed the Palmer in the 2030s.
The administration says the cuts will free up resources for America’s three aging Antarctic research stations. But scientists said they would endanger decades of U.S. leadership in studying the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic coast, where waters warmed by the emissions from burning fossil fuels are melting the ice from below.
After half a century in which the United States has had one or more ships devoted to Antarctic science, the Palmer’s decommissioning would effectively cede access to the most unexplored region of the globe to other nations. And given how booked up those nations’ ships are, polar veterans said the chances were slim that many stranded American scientists could easily hitch new rides.
“I just think it’s tragic, really, for U.S. science,” said Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey. Graduate students and younger scientists will be hit hardest, Larter said. Unable to do field work and publish research, many of them will simply quit polar science, he said.
“Effectively, you’ve lost a whole generation, a lot of expertise that will be lost and difficult to restart,” Larter said.
When asked about the Palmer’s fate, the National Science Foundation, which runs the U.S. polar research program, said it had “started the process” to terminate its lease on the ship. The agency said it would “identify vessels and partnerships to continue support of marine science” and assess next year whether to resume evaluating potential vendors for the Palmer’s successor. Planning for the successor ship has been underway for more than two decades.
Named after the Connecticut sealer and whaler who is believed to be among the first Americans to see the Antarctic mainland, the Nathaniel B. Palmer can host 39 scientists and staff members. It has six labs, an aquarium room and a hangar for two helicopters, plus a sauna, workout room and movie lounge. It can bash through 3 feet of ice while traveling at 3 knots, or 3.5 mph.
Jamin Greenbaum, a polar geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks of the Palmer, which is nearing its 35th birthday, like a trusty old pickup truck.
There are ships with more bells and whistles: Britain’s new polar vessel, the Sir David Attenborough, for instance. There are smaller, more specialized ships.
The Palmer is “like this middle-of-the-road, good, reliable truck that you love,” Greenbaum said.
Getting aboard isn’t easy. Every Antarctic field season, which typically runs from late October through March, the Palmer makes just a handful of voyages, each of them one to two months long. So even once scientists secure funding for an expedition, it can be years before they set sail.
At sea, the work is tough: The long travel times leave only a short, precious window for gathering data. Abysmal weather and immobilizing sea ice — plus the myriad unforeseeable obstacles that can arise in the planet’s harshest environments — shrink the window further.
It’s an invaluable experience, said Thompson of Caltech.
His first trip to the Bellingshausen Sea was aboard the Palmer in 2019. The measurements he and his team collected unlocked new insights about how warm currents reach the Antarctic coast, and steered their plans for the return expedition he hopes to take next year, if the Palmer is still in service.
Working with colleagues in the focused and intense environment of a ship led to “real bursts of creativity,” Thompson said. “There’s no way of replicating that completely with autonomous vehicles.”
Rebecca Robinson, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, traveled on the Palmer last year to observe the spring bloom of diatoms, the single-celled plankton that encode chemical signatures of the water around them in their shells. Fossilized diatoms give scientists records of ocean history that can go back millions of years.
“It’s very expensive to work in Antarctica,” Robinson said. “It has high risk.” Yet for understanding how the warming climate is changing this enormous part of the world, and how it is changing the rest of the planet in turn, there’s no substitute for being there, she said.
Antarctic research is globe-spanning by nature: Scientists regularly collaborate with international colleagues and travel on other nations’ ships. But such collaborations work best when they’re based on exchange, not one-way dependence, said Kurt S. Panter, a geologist at Bowling Green State University. Panter traveled to the Ross Sea aboard the Palmer this year, in what might prove to have been the ship’s final science expedition. “I hope that isn’t the case,” he said.
Two or three decades ago, when South Korea had barely established its own polar science capabilities, American scientists generously shared their resources and expertise, said Won Sang Lee, a principal research scientist at the Korea Polar Research Institute. Today, South Korea would be glad to return the favor, Lee said.
But given how long it takes to plan Antarctic expeditions, it would be hard to slot many American researchers onto Korean voyages anytime soon, Lee said.
South Korea recently commissioned a new polar science ship that will be twice as large as its current one, the Araon. China has five polar research vessels and is planning more.
“It’s just so odd that we’re contracting at a time when other nations are recognizing the importance of advancing knowledge in these areas,” said Phil Bart, a geophysicist at Louisiana State University.
Trump’s domestic policy bill puts billions of dollars toward new Coast Guard icebreakers in the Arctic, where his administration is aiming to counter Russian and Chinese influence. Coast Guard ships support U.S. research in Antarctica, though they aren’t set up to host many scientists or their instruments and labs.
The Palmer serves another function for U.S. science: It hauls away the hazardous waste from America’s Antarctic stations.
The National Science Foundation could try chartering ships to do this. But “you’ll find it very difficult to charter a vessel that will handle somebody else’s waste,” said Larter of the British Antarctic Survey. “Because no country wants it off-loaded.”
The NSF declined to say whether it had a plan for carrying waste if the Palmer is docked for good.